Monday, 20 August 2012

Barry Forshaw’s Book To Die For - The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

British
critic Barry Forshaw is a writer and journalist whose writing career covers a
number of genres. He is the acknowledged
expert on Scandinavian crime fiction and the author of numerous work on films
and crime fiction. He has done
documentaries on crime fiction for a number of television stations. His work includes The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia. He is also the editor of the well-regarded
online crime fiction magazine Crime Time. His most recent book is Death in a Cold Climate - A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction and
his latest book, which is due out in September, is British Crime Film: Subverting the Social Order. A former Vice-Chair of the Crime Writers’Association. He also wrote the first UK
biography on Stieg Larsson – The Man Who
Left Too Soon.

Had Graham
Greene (1904-1991) not written
the 'serious' novels (such as A Burnt Case and The Heart of the
Matter) which marked him out as one of the greatest of all English writers,
his ‘entertainments’ (as the author rather dismissively described them) would
constitute a body of crime and thriller fiction almost without equal in the
field. Early in his career, Greene
introduced an element of the spy story into The Confidential Agent (1939),
in which D, the agent of a Latin government (Republican Spain in all but name),
figures in a narrative that was clearly influential on such later writers as
John le Carré. The latter has long
acknowledged Greene’s considerable influence on his work. Greene's most celebrated crime novel, of
course, is Brighton Rock (1938, with its psychotic young antihero
Pinkie), which the author decided to move out of his ‘entertainments’ category. This sometimes slippery shifting of genres by
the author was always a rather arbitrary endeavour: the moral concerns of the
thrillers were often precisely those of the more serious books, while the
pursuit narratives of the serious books (such as the whisky priest on the run
in The Power and the Glory, 1940) had precisely the same visceral
trajectory as the thrillers. However,
all the books have that dark and sardonic view of existence, which quickly
became identified as ‘Greeneland’, a queasy admixture of the seedy, the
surrealistically funny and the dangerous.
Two other crucial ingredients need to be identified in the Greene mix:
the author’s uneasy relationship with Catholicism (he converted under the
influence of his wife's piety, but was never an unquestioning believer after
the fashion of his correspondent and colleague Evelyn Waugh, who chastised
Greene for his doubts). Greene’s work is
also distinguished by its frank and realistic depiction of the sexual relations
between men and women – not, that is to say, in any graphic fashion, but with
an unblinking assessment of the joys and despair concomitant with sexual
passion.

Which novel is the best of his thrillers? Brighton Rock, with its
brilliantly realised picture of a violent seaside underworld, is as strong a
starting point for those new to Greene as anything he wrote, but my personal
choice, on balance, is the superbly honed thriller The Ministry of Fear
(1943), which demonstrates an authority and mastery of the narrative form that
makes most practitioners look mere journeymen.
London in the Blitz is brilliantly conjured by the author in this
dazzling piece. This is an
‘entertainment’, but the moral issues here are as rigorously handled as
anything tackled by Greene in his more ambitious novels. Arthur Rowe, full of guilt after the death of
his sick wife, is plunged into a dangerous world of murderous, shadowy figures. The Ministry of Fear is possibly the
author’s most sheerly enjoyable novel in the ‘thriller’ vein. (Fritz Lang made a creditable stab at The
Ministry of Fear for the cinema.)